


The Botanist

by patron_saint_of_the_dodo



Category: The Outer Worlds (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Major Character Injury, Mutual Pining, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Porn With Plot, Probably too much plot, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:08:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21675004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patron_saint_of_the_dodo/pseuds/patron_saint_of_the_dodo
Summary: "Have you ever eaten a real apple?" she said suddenly, her eyes no longer distant. It seemed like a ridiculous question in the moment, even child-like."Well...I-I don't think I've ever met anyone who has. Certainly not in Halcyon." Max feared there was some strange meaning to her question and hesitated, shifting in his chair."Right. Of course," she stood and walked to the sink, "they wiped them out what? Eighty years ago?"*****The Captain grew up on Earth in the poverty-stricken vestiges of America's farmland. Her idealism and passion turn destructive when she finally experiences Halcyon. An injury finally sends her over the edge into a depression, and she needs the help of her ship's vicar to come to terms with the universe.
Relationships: The Captain/Maximillian DeSoto
Comments: 8
Kudos: 34





	The Botanist

**Author's Note:**

> This is my FIRST EVER fic I've posted online. I've written for years for myself but never really had the guts to post anything. I love The Outer Worlds and I love Vicar Max! I wanted to write a shorter smut piece but as soon as I started thinking about this Captain, she just took over and it became much more of a character piece. I actually don't generally like fics that retell a whole game. We are often much more interested in our own characters and how they reflect us than we are in other people and their characters. So I will try not to do that here, or I at least hope that this Captain is interesting enough to make it bearable. 
> 
> I'm long-winded and we're a ways off from the smut probably, please hang in there! 
> 
> Also, dear reader, feel free to pour your heart out in the comments! I'd love to know what YOU would like to read about.

Supposedly, people in stasis don’t dream. Ruth wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. The adverts made it sound like passing ten years in the blink of an eye was a luxury. To her, falling asleep and waking suddenly with no dreams was just losing time and being cheated of knowing you slept at all. She was looking forward to really sleeping. She was tired. She decided to visit her parents one last time before she was gone from Earth forever. It felt like saying goodbye on her death bed, and for her parents it had to seem that way. They would never see her or speak to her again. There were comms relays to earth, but she knew that in reality it would be her parents who died while she was asleep and she would awake impossibly far away. She hoped it would be like reincarnation; her old life totally obliterated by distance and time. Ten years wasn’t so long she wouldn’t recognize names in the news. But she wasn’t a celebrity. Ten years was plenty of time for death and forgetfulness to erase her. She was ready to be washed clean of Earth.

She and her parents sat on the porch in silence. They had known for months this moment would come, and said everything there was to say. She should have left hours ago. They kept having false starts to her departure, leaving the dinner table and saying goodbye only to settle into easy conversation in the kitchen. Again, goodbyes and sundries from home tucked into coat pockets, more tears. Again, hesitating in the living room. They had made their way out to the porch and there was nowhere left to go. The automated corporate transport that was to take Ruth to the Hope was waiting, a punctuality assurance indicator light on the side blinking furious orange.

Ruth looked out over the landscape. Her parents came from a family of farmers, long ago. It had been almost impossible to grow anything for decades and the acreage had slowly been overtaken by dust after the engineered erosion control had poisoned the soil. The view from the farmhouse porch looked like Mars before it was terraformed. Ruth’s mouth twitched into a bitter smirk at the idea. Humans could terraform Mars to look like the garden of Eden, but they couldn’t nurture the garden on earth that millions of years of life before them had cultivated. She wondered if anyone else she would wake up with in Halcyon even knew the word “Eden.”

She had grown up in what was practically a museum. Memories of a time when ordinary people worked the earth, memories of automobiles and religions that nobody knew the names of. Officially, most of the land around her home was considered an uninhabited desert. It certainly didn’t produce anything anybody wanted to buy. It was a backwards place, where old people clung to the ways of life nobody had really lived since their great-great-great-grandparents’ generations.

They managed to survive, barely. Even though there were never any crops to sell, and hadn’t been for close to a century, the people out there still called themselves farmers. It was technically true. They were able to grow just enough to survive, raising vegetables in the meager compost chicken shit and kitchen scraps could provide. Raising large livestock without permits was illegal and most of the highly engineered animals couldn’t survive farm conditions anyway. Chickens, roaming from farm to farm as community property were the only meat anyone out there really was able to eat. Growing up, everyone told her the flock had been there since far before the soil dried up. She assumed it must be true, since she had never figured out a different way they could have found and paid for animals that could live outside on almost nothing. Every new thing the labs made seemed to require more resources to grow or make than the products and creatures before it. She promised herself she wouldn’t ever eat another goddamn egg again when she left for the city where she could buy food she didn’t have to grow. The irony being that once she was hired to help plan food production for the colony, the hardy chicken was her first suggestion. 

It felt like most of the warm aunties and uncles she had been raised with were all dead. Most of the children she grew up with left, but with no corporate ties and the wrong education they generally struggled in slums or were arrested for vagrancy and sent to work camps. She had been a little luckier, or maybe a little more cutthroat. She sold a few old family pictures to an antiquities collector to pay for her education, and did whatever she needed to do to eat and to sleep in a real bed. She wanted to fix things for her family. She studied horticulture, tried to understand what needed to be done. Even after all her work on her thesis the only job she could get was a shitty lab bench position helping her “betters” work on the same kind of over-engineered junkfood crops that had been starving her family for generations. It was surreal to her to realize how much common knowledge was taboo, and she had sunk into a despair.

She buried herself in old books and bad company for a decade of work at that lab. She learned about the past, the slow march of algae to moss to fern to pine to oak. That world was dying. There was almost nothing left of wild things and wild places. The ocean had been emptied of its legacy and filled back up with monocultures of farmed fish. The forests that did exist were carefully managed exhibits that didn’t resemble the complex mutualisms she read about one bit. Her boss laughed in her face when she told him fungus could be helpful when growing test crops in soil. She wondered if he could even pronounce mycorrhizae.

She drank when she wasn’t working, only in the slums, away from the absurdities of her corporate job where the people could still admit everything was bullshit. She met radicals and criminals, and she rotted inside as she imagined revenge: the ocean rising up to swallow every glittering costal city; the streets lined with thousands of bodies from some new plague; her stupid boss being smothered by the glossy leaves of a garden she would someday have the space to grow. In her dreams she talked to extinct cycads. In her dreams the soil was rich and black. In her dreams she swam in an ocean where nothing had died. She was either dreaming or drunk most of the time in those days. The gleaming white lab and the unnatural organisms in it only existed as a transparent screen between her and daydreams of a better past and a catastrophic future.

Somewhere in those queasy days she heard about the Hope. They were going to planets no human had yet destroyed, and they were taking the best of the best. She wasn’t the best on Earth, but maybe she could be in the colony. On real wild planets with real wild dirt. More than that, their own life. Ecosystems untouched by industry, unseen by covetous human eyes. A new world. It would be owned by corporations, but surely she would be more free in a place like that than the shrieking neon hell on Earth?

_Maybe I really am dying._ _My life certainly is flashing before my eyes._

The indicator on her transport began flashing too- bright red, and an insistent alarm began to chime. She felt like she was going to faint. She lurched out of her chair, and stumbled a terrified step to the transport. Her mother cried out something incomprehensible and rushed to hold her. Her father finally wept. The sound of rushing blood pounded in her ears so loudly she couldn’t hear what her mother was saying, but she knew.

_“We’re proud of you. I love you.”_

She practically ran to the transport, breathing shakily as she climbed inside and pressed the display to depart. The vehicle jolted forward and zipped along the dusty plain with a quiet hum. She wondered if this was what maggots felt like- blind and terrified, entering a pupa for a long sleep so that they can finally flee a rotting carcass.


End file.
